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Well, if your Gateway has lasted you that long might want to get a new Gateway but if you want different name brand computer i have a Compaq an mine is around 7 years old an it still runs like its new it's very fast i watch movies an download songs everyday an it anit slow down a bit

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If you can put a bookshelf or piece of furniture together you can put a pc together.

Getting a Dell or Gateway is a crap shoot. Both companies are terrilble on customer service and the parts they put in their computers. I had a gateway back a few years ago and it was nothing but problems from day 1, it's the reason I learned how to put one together myself.

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If you want one of those off-the-shelf PC's, get a Dell or a Acer. I've bought 25-30 Acers at my work (off pcconnection.com) and we've only had 1 bad CDROM. Keep in mind our employees use these PC's 8-10 hours a day, for the last 5 years. They aren't heavy in graphics though.

Building it yourself is the best bet, for sure.

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I've bought 2 HPs in the past 3 years for my daughter and I. On mine I added a video card and some more RAM for gaming, hers, her hard drive failed a year into it but it was under warranty. Hers was a cheaper model.

I used to build my own PCs but found it was not worth a weekend of tinkering, trying to load/find drivers, etc. to save maybe 50-75 bucks on a 500$ machine. Preloaded PCs have all that stuff ready to go as far as drivers, and someone, somewhere, has tested the parts together and determined that they all play well together enough to offer a warranty to the machine as a whole.

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I've bought 2 HPs in the past 3 years for my daughter and I. On mine I added a video card and some more RAM for gaming, hers, her hard drive failed a year into it but it was under warranty. Hers was a cheaper model.

I used to build my own PCs but found it was not worth a weekend of tinkering, trying to load/find drivers, etc. to save maybe 50-75 bucks on a 500$ machine. Preloaded PCs have all that stuff ready to go as far as drivers, and someone, somewhere, has tested the parts together and determined that they all play well together enough to offer a warranty to the machine as a whole.

Everything you buy to build a PC comes with driver discs, in the last 10 years I've never built a PC that didn't come with all of that.